Kajeet goes live with GPS phone locator service

Kajeet, the cellphone service for kids that gives parents peace of mind, has gone live with their GPS phone locator service. Kajeet are the only pay as you go MVNO that offers GPS phone tracking (“GPS phone locator service”).

I’ve been following Kajeet for a while (see posts) and I remember browsing their pay as you go handsets in Best Buy a few months ago.

I met with Daniel Neal, founder and CEO last night at ShowStoppers. I only met him for about five minutes and loved every moment of it. It’s not often you meet a CEO of an MVNO who actually likes what he’s doing or who can actually SHOW you around the service, demonstrating intimate knowledge and passion.

Daniel is living Kajeet, big time. He and his team have created a brilliant service that offers a wealth of configuration possibilities for parents.

Here’s the main configuration screen:

You can change almost everything about each child’s account from this dashboard. There are so many options it’s unreal. For example, you can specify that your child can’t use his mobile phone during the hours of 9am – 3pm whilst they’re at school. BUT you can specify that they can always call your number and other select phone numbers at all times. I like that option.

If you’ve got the GPS add on pack, you can be alerted if your child’s mobile phone is NOT in the vicinity of the school during class hours. Fantastic. You can set a variety of payment options and restrictions — limiting your child’s use from a financial perspective, or setting auto-bill amounts whenever the balance is used up. You can even opt to charge *your* account for all calls made to mum and dad, so that the child can use their balance for communicating with their friends and so on.

The GPS mapping is as you’d expect:

Here you can set options for text, IM, video and the like:

I really like this level of granularity — particularly when you’re dealing with tween/teenagers. Of course, you can simply give the handset, unrestricted, to the child if you want. Since I’m not a parent, I can’t judge on just how I’ll react but I reckon I would like to make use of a service like Kajeet.

Parents amongst us, could you comment?